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Wednesday, 22 August 2012

KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel (AP) — When Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi
decided to investigate his family's unknown Holocaust history, he turned
to the skill he knew best: He began to dig.

After learning that
two of his uncles were murdered in the infamous Sobibor death camp, he
embarked on a landmark excavation project that is shining new light on
the workings of one of the most notorious Nazi killing machines,
including pinpointing the location of the gas chambers where hundreds of
thousands were killed.
Sobibor, in eastern Poland, marks perhaps
the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to wipe
out European Jewry. Unlike other camps that had at least a facade of
being prison or labor camps, Sobibor and the neighboring camps Belzec
and Treblinka were designed specifically for exterminating Jews. Victims
were transported there in cattle cars and gassed to death almost
immediately.
But researching Sobibor has been difficult. After an
October 1943 uprising at the camp, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it
to the ground, replanting over it to cover their tracks.
Today,
tall trees cover most of the former camp grounds. Because there were so
few survivors — only 64 were known — there has never been an authentic
layout of the camp, where the Nazis are believed to have murdered some
250,000 Jews over an 18-month period. From those few survivors' memories
and partial German documentation, researchers had only limited
understanding of how the camp operated.
"I feel like I am an
investigator in a criminal forensic laboratory," Haimi, 51, said near
his home in southern Israel this week, a day before departing for
another dig in Poland. "After all, it is a murder scene."
Over
five years of excavations, Haimi has been able to remap the camp and has
unearthed thousands of items. He hasn't found anything about his
family, but amid the teeth, bone shards and ashes through which he has
sifted, he has recovered jewelry, keys and coins that have helped
identify some of Sobibor's formerly